Detective Novels Are the Perfect Guilty Pleasure

"For me it’s more about the cathartic fantasy of exposing and containing evil."

By
Maile Meloy

May 30, 2017

Don Penny

Lately I’ve been listening to British detective novels as audiobooks in the car, and also while walking or folding laundry or washing dishes. I write novels that are shelved as literary fiction, but I end up listening to crime stories in any spare minute. I just finished the three novels J.K. Rowling wrote as Robert Galbraith, about the bruised and weary detective Cormoran Strike. Rowling is a genius at narrative tension and at passing the point of view seamlessly between Strike and his skillful, self-doubting assistant, Robin Ellacott. I desperately want those characters to be happy, and I couldn’t solve any of the mysteries before they did.

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Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series, written for kids but suitable for adults, are perfect audiobooks. So are Kate Atkinson’s detective novels (and her non-detective novels). John le Carré’s first two books were very short murder mysteries, before he switched to spies. Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and The Paying Guests are about crime, and also about love, secrecy, history, betrayal, and sacrifice.

I was watching Happy Valley and paused it when my husband came in. He looked at the screen and said, “It’s raining, there’s a police officer, they’re driving on the left, everyone looks unhappy, there’s probably a corpse. Must be one of Maile’s shows.”

In “The Guilty Vicarage,” W.H. Auden said that detective stories were escapism for those with a sense of guilt, who wanted to feel it expunged. But I think that for me it’s more about the cathartic fantasy of exposing and containing evil. Even when the protagonists are flawed and thwarted and the endings ambiguous—maybe especially then—the model remains: The villains lie shamelessly, the brilliant, dogged detective catches them in their lies, and justice is done. Nothing, these days, is more satisfying than that.

Maile Meloy's new novel, Do Not Be Alarmed, will be published in June by Riverhead.

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2017 issue of Town & Country.

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